Checksum Arcanius

There was (yet another) post today on Slashdot about Apple’s policies on its App Store for the iPhone. Often I find interesting and funny content in the comments, so I read those as well — and after doing so, I wanted to share some of the better comments and my thoughts:

Budenny commented:

If you don’t like the way Apple runs its store, don’t buy from it.
… If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t do it.
… If you don’t like murder, don’t commit it.
… If you don’t like France, don’t go there.
… If you don’t like math, don’t learn it.
… If you don’t care for Enron, don’t buy the stock.
… If you don’t like subprime, don’t take one out.
Why am I starting to wonder if there might not be something a little bit wrong with this form of argument?

To which Foorat replied:

If you don’t like that form of argument, don’t use it.

Which of course was quite amusing, but Budenny’s point is well taken: I generally advocate the “if you don’t like ___, then don’t ___” approach myself. It’s how I feel about gay marriage, for example — I don’t feel that it impacts me significantly one way or the other, so I don’t care if people (who are not me) do it.

It doesn’t seem to work for murder, though. Why not?  Because the unstated assumption in the argument is that the actions are such that they don’t affect people not willfully involved in the action. Murder, by definition, has an unwilling participant, so that unstated assumption clearly does not hold and the argument fails.

What about gay marriage? I don’t think it affects me personally. I know that others feel differently, though. Just because they are unable or unwilling to state why they feel this way (I recently saw a clip of Mike Huckabee unable to state how his marriage would be negatively impacted by gay marriage), doesn’t mean they don’t feel this way. One of my guesses is that some truly believe that if they go too far down the path of “redefining marriage”, then we will be in for an episode of Sodom and Gomorrah (ancient cities that were destoryed by God with fire for sexual deviation). Maybe people feel that such a claim today would be ridiculed; it doesn’t change how they feel though.

The other examples are similar: “If you don’t like subprime [mortgages], don’t take one out” — this has the implicit assumption that a subprime mortgage affects only the parties involved, which is no longer the popular way of looking at things (I would argue that, without government intervention, the statement would hold predominately true: the effect on the borrowers and lenders would so far outweigh any effect on me that it would be acceptable for others to make and take subprime mortgages. Unfortunately, government stepped in and has made it my burden to pay for the mistakes of evil corporations and stupid people).

The real question that arrives out of this is, who determines what affects other people and what doesn’t? Given that it is an impossibility to account for every externality, what in the world qualifies as a significant enough externality to make the overhead of regulation (with all of its pitfalls) a better solution?

This is the crux of the problem with modern politics, and especially with the libertarian philosophy that I am so fond of: everyone has a different opinion on what is “significant enough.” My set is fairly small, but I know people whose sets seem endless to me. Really, the modern conservative and liberal philosophies are simply different interpretations of where government has the right or responsibility to interfere with people and libertarianism is simply a very small subset of the intersection of the two philosophies.

That is happens to be the right subset is ever-apparent to me, but not, apparently,  to very many others.

From another comment, quoting the original article:

Of course, many are quick to remind that it is Apple’s store and they are free to do whatever they want with it.

Kind of like it is Microsoft’s operating system, and they are free do anything they like with it. Except, it seems, provide a web browser.

Ah, so biting, but so true. But antitrust regulations are a topic for another day.

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 10:25 AM, wrote:

Dear Ryan Edward McElroy,

Your department recommended approval of your Spring, 2009 request to receive a MASTER OF SCIENCE (COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING) and this recommendation has been sent to the Graduate School. Any departmental comments are noted below. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this recommendation, please contact your department’s Graduate Program Assistant (staff member) or Graduate Program Coordinator (faculty advisor).

My previous plans of retiring Frankenputen may have to be accelerated. Today, Frankenputen stopped serving for an unknown reason. I was able to resuscitate it by forcing a restart via the excellent Remote Insight console, but I’m beginning to wonder how much longer the beast will last.

I’ve started twittering. For a long time, I had no interest in the phenomenon, but recently I’ve noticed that I’m not blogging as much as I want to, while I still have lots of ideas I want to write about. In a perfect world, a lot of these ideas would become full blog posts; however, until I rededicate myself to making that happen, my hope is that at least the ideas won’t die unheard — they can now live on as tweets. As Mark Cuban said, “Tweets are the blog posts you thought about writing, but didn’t feel they had enough substance.” (Hat tip Theo)

So, if you’re into that sort of thing, you can follow me on Twitter, or just occasionally visit my blog to see my most recent tweets.

I’m also considering a “daily digest” of my tweets as actual blog posts; there is a plug-in to do that.

My upcoming trip to Peru has been mostly planned. There are four of us going — myself, my former roommate Kunlun, my high school friend Scott, and Scott’s college roommate Ben. We leave on the 14th of June — a day after I officially graduate with my Masters degree in Computer Science. Kunlun and I are leaving from Seattle, while Scott and Ben will be flying out of Pittsburgh. We will meet in Lima early on the 15th, and then the adventure begins. Our plan is to jump on a bus that will take us from Lima through Arequipa to Lake Titicaca, finally stopping at Cusco, spending a few days at each destination. After the Inti Raymi festival in Cusco, we leave on a 4-day hiking expedition on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, returning by train, and then flying back to Lima to finish up the trip in the capital city. We fly out three weeks after we arrive on the 4th of July. If all goes well, I will be back in Seattle in time to watch some fireworks.

It should be a blast!

This summer will be a time of great transition for me. I will be finishing up with school (for the time being at least), going on several trips, and moving to the San Francisco Bay Area to start a new job. In addition to planning the trips, I have been thinking about the other aspects of the transition. One of these aspects will involve the moving of the servers that run silverfir.net.

Currently, the computer that runs most of silverfir.net is called Frankenputen (a well deserved name — it is literally a server scraped together by Dan from various ebay purchases). It is housed at my parent’s place, and it makes a lot of noise and heat (and probably consumes a lot of juice as well), so I thank them for being so long-suffering with the beast. Alongside Frakenputen is oasis, my old desktop, and what ran silverfir.net before Frankenputen, but after sf2, which came after wadi.

As part of this transition, I plan to move away from Frankenputen and transition entirely to nexus, the fileserver I currently use in my Seattle home. It is much smaller, quite quiet, and is, overall, a much more capable machine: it currently runs an Ahtlon 2600+, but will probably soon be a P4 2.8GHz. While it is not server-quality hardware, it is pretty, quiet, and small, which is really what I’m looking for.

Along with this transition will come some silverfir.net downtime, and probably a massive dumping of unused-but-still-available websites hosted on silverfir.net. This is just a warning that if you are looking to control your own website’s fate, and it is currently hosted on silverfir.net, you might want to evaluate your options and see if you want to stick through the transition period or not.

My freedom-loving friend Jeff E. Jared is a frequent writer of letters to the editor. His latest published letter is well worth a read:

Daniel Bennet believes that the cause of our economic woes “was the institutions which had never had any regulations to begin with” and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (3-25). He couldn’t be more wrong.

Banking is heavily regulated. There’s the Federal Reserve (which controls interest rates and the money supply), the SEC (which enforces regulations), the Glass-Steagall Acts (1932-33), Federal Deposit Insurance (FDIC), capital requirements, reserve requirements, financial reporting and disclosure requirements, credit rating requirements, large exposure restrictions, related party restrictions, affiliation restrictions and payment system requirements. Money is the most regulated thing in America.

Mr. Bennet cited the repeal of the Glass-Steagall as a cause of the crises. But remember, only part of Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, the part barring investment banks from combining with regular banks. It kept deposit insurance (FDIC) backed by the government. Thus, the risk was socialized (because FDIC would bail out bad banks) while profit was privatized (now being able to combine, get big and diversify). This is corporate socialism.

Further, the institutions that failed, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, were investment banks that didn’t combine with commercial banks. They were bought by banks that had combined under deregulation to become stronger: B of A and JPMorganChase. So without the repeal, the crises might be worse.

The root problem is that previous government bailouts, like the S & L crises of the 1980’s, were always looming in the background to encourage risky behavior. It doesn’t make sense to forbid banks to diversify their product line to limit risk, while at the same time guaranteeing their deposits–which increases risk. So the repeal of Glass-Steagall didn’t go far enough.

Liberals who support regulation often fall into this trap. They see a problem, and–failing to understand that we don’t have unfettered capitalism and that there are pages and pages of regulations already—they mistakenly demand more regulations, rather than repealing the excessive ones we already have.

The American economy is not a free market. It might have been in 1880, but since FDR and the New Deal 1930’s, we haven’t been close. The key is to deregulate by abolishing the Federal Reserve and ending subsidized insurance to the banking industry, and repealing the rest of Glass-Steagall.

Without the FDIC, banks would be tuned into any potential panics and runs and reel in their loans accordingly when public anxiety rose, like a kind of shock absorber. Subsidies and regulations disable this natural self-regulation of the market.

Jeff E. Jared, Kirkland